"The ego doesn't want to be healed; it wants to be held."— Peter Crone
Language is rarely as innocent as it seems.
Words slip into one another, edges blurring amidst casual exchange, while distinct ideas become interchangeable in everyday life.
Of late, I can’t help but notice how “Capacity" and "capability" are examples of such.
Blame it on my hangover from graduating Peter Crone’s mastermind, the IFS and Somatic training I’m doing, or just the effect that seemed to have inadvertently taken on all the pop-psychology reels popping up (see what I did there?) on my social media feed, but it seems like we tend to think of them as synonyms.
But for those of us in the habit of pressing our ear a little closer, it’s easy to notice how they are actually pointing at two very different things.
‘Capacity’, from the Latin capacitas, is fundamentally about holding.
The capacity of an engine. A tank. How much a vessel can receive before it overflows.
It is an inward measurement, directly proportional to interior volume.
Capability, by contrast, faces outwards.
It refers to what we can do: our skills, our talents, the things we train and sharpen and deploy. And while capability is where our culture tends to lavish its attention, (productivity systems, skill-building frameworks, hustle culture's relentless emphasis on output), capacity seems to be resurfacing in our collective vocabulary in ways worth examining more closely.
An older idea new
One of the clearest signs of the concept of capacity re-entering public consciousness the way it has is the rise of a phrase that has become quite fashionable in therapeutic and wellness circles: holding space.
To hold space for someone, as it's commonly used, means to be present with them without judgment, trying to fix, or filling the silence with our own anxieties.
It is, at its core, a practice of containing (another term climbing up the trendy charts). The act of enlarging one’s interior volume to receive and hold another person's experience.
But there is a deeper and perhaps even more unsettling truth beneath the ever-increasing commodification of that phrase. Though rarely stated explicitly, what the idiom "holding space" really gestures toward is the practice of holding multiple truths simultaneously. Ours and that of another and/or others.
Not resolving them.
Not picking a side.
Not collapsing the complexity of it all into something more comfortable.
Simply holding the fullness of it in the entirety of its weight.
Parallel Realities
জতো মত, ততো পথ। "Joto mot, toto poth."— Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836–1886).
(Translation: "As many views, so many paths.")
I was born in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). The city where the intriguing mystic Ramakrishna Chattopadhyay, better known as just Shri Ramakrishna, lived and taught.
My relationship with my birthplace, which I left as a seven-month-old baby and returned to as a pre-adolescent, feeling ridiculously foreign in an environment that was being called ‘home,’ is a complicated and severe one. But on the bright side, what it resulted in me absorbing through the air was a metaphysical inheritance of sorts that never treated the coexistence of paradoxes as unusual.
The idea that there are as many paths as there are perspectives was not, in the world I partly grew up around, a radical proposition, but simply an observation.
I’d argue that this is precisely what capacity in its deepest sense requires: the willingness to be a vessel large enough to hold what does not necessarily resolve.
"The mark of an educated mind is the ability to hold a thought without accepting it."
— often attributed to Aristotle
What Music Knows
I’m a professional musician.
Before I decided that being a singer-songwriter and producer was my calling, I spent the earlier years of that journey working as a pianist performing, recording and accompanying singers, horn players, and other soloists in the particular social ecosystem of jazz and (even if often very distantly), related musical styles.
And it was in that world, more than the many psychology seminars or philosophy texts later in life, that the distinction between capacity and capability had made its earliest presence real to me in an undeniably visceral manner.
There exists a category of musician in jazz that the community describes (with an awkward mixture of admiration and faint exasperation), as "flashy."
These are players of unambiguous technical brilliance. Rapid execution, volume, and a very obvious arsenal of capability on display.
And yet more often than not, the brilliance can overshadow the essence of what music means to blokes like me.
Miles Davis, (a personal hero despite the controversy around his erratic social behaviour) was one of the most articulate theorists of musical economy the world has produced. As he did with most of his notes, he nailed the discourse with one curt sentence:
The music is in the silence as much as in the notes. — Miles Davis
What the ‘flashy’ player so often cannot do, or will not do, is leave space.
In the vocabulary of jazz, the act of supporting a soloist, a job often outsourced to pianists (and later guitar players) by default, is called comping. The art of accompanying a soloist or vocalist with harmonic and rhythmic presence that serves the music and their moment, and not competing with it.
It is, in the truest sense, ‘holding space’. In fact, not just holding it, but enhancing every aspect that the space involves. Practising the musical capacity to complement (hence the word ‘comping’), the statement the soloist leads in context to the overall aim of the music.
Historically, it can be notoriously difficult for the technically gifted, flashy players who have spent years developing capabilities, building an identity around the spotlight and the volume of content they can produce to project their interpretation of it.
Subordinating that output to the larger shape of the music is not considered the sexiest skill to work on by most budding musicians, as many a music teacher and coach (me included), will have you know.
Me on the other hand? I hid behind my instrument for the longest time in my search for safety. So while I worked in secret on my capabilities to ensure that my moment in the spotlight came across as a well-earned one when the time was right, I'd keep sneaking into the club (literally and metaphorically) in the meantime by offering what felt easier for me.
Supporting the voice of those who found the spotlight an easier place to hide behind.
I was often hired precisely because I was known as the guy who ‘listened’. Singers and soloists would tell me this openly. They were less interested in the ten-fingers-on-keys pianists with the knee-jerk habit of competing for the spotlight with them, but needed someone whose interior space was large enough to hold them in good light (pun intended), in the broader context.
The ensemble, the room, the audience, and the emotional arc of the entire performance.
'Listen to me'
Psychologist and listening scholar Michael Nichols notes that genuine listening, the kind that actually registers another person's experience, requires the suppression of one's own internal narrative.
This is not merely a social skill, but a neurological act of making room. Enlarging capacity. And it is, paradoxically, one of the most demanding things a skilled person can choose to do.
The counterintuitive truth that music eventually teaches anyone paying attention, is this: the player with the greatest capacity, the one who truly listens, who can hold the whole room in their awareness, who does not rush to fill every silence, tends, over time, to say things that matter far more than the player who never stops playing.
Thelonious Monk's hesitations. Bill Evans' suspended resolutions. The devastating specificity of a Chet Baker phrase delivered at half the speed you expected.
"The piano ain't got no wrong notes."— Thelonious Monk
'Take the Horn Out of Your Mouth'
The famous story behind that quote is when Miles told his bandmate John Coltrane, one of history's most important musicians ever, to simply take the horn out of his mouth — his retort to addressing the legendarily long, adventurous solos that Trane is famous for. When Coltrane said he 'didn't know how to stop', that was Miles' answer. Blunt. Unambiguous. And probably the most efficient masterclass in restraint ever delivered.
Humour apart, it points to something crucial.
Restraint is not an argument for passivity. Coltrane and Miles are probably one of the most powerful collaborations to have existed in music's history. And despite the very masculine, somewhat brash nature of this famous exchange, it also represents how both poles make the spectrum what it is.
Coltrane's infinite, blissful ferociousness and Miles' restraint that made one singular note have the kind of impact that has earned him the title 'Dark Prince'.
Capacity without capability is its own kind of failure. The artist who only listens, hesitates to develop the technical language to articulate what they're receiving and bounce it back, can become a kind of musical black hole: absorptive but not generative.
Present but mute.
The quiet can get too quiet. The meek, too meek. And the balance of it all that makes the music work is the collateral damage.
The mat and music
There is another arena where this distinction becomes even more visceral. Where the stakes are not aesthetic but immediate and physical.
Martial arts.
I have had an ongoing clandestine relationship with it throughout my life, though never a competitive one. Competition was never really something I could afford to risk my hands at (literally), and I'd argue it wasn't the point in the deepest traditions of the form either.
This tends to get lost in the spectacle of modern MMA culture, with its emphasis on dominance, performance, and theatrical choreography.
The popular image of the martial artist is an extraordinarily capable one: fast, strong, acrobatic, technically overwhelming, intimidating to the point of being violent.
But the true masters, the serious practitioners actually study tend to embody something a bit quieter and I daresay more intricate to acquire.
"The ultimate aim of martial arts is not having to use them."— Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
At the core of genuine martial arts philosophy, whether Judo's ju yoku go o seisu (softness controls hardness), the yielding principle of Aikido, the ground-game patience of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or even the rhythmic intricacy of an apparently brutish modality like boxing, is not the maximization of force, but the cultivation of presence under pressure.
Capacity, not just capability.
‘’we are all martial artists’’—Ryan Hurst (On the Mat Forever)
In his book 'On the Mat Forever', my dear friend Ryan Hurst, Co-founder of GMB fitness, talks about how we all are, in essence, arguably martial artists in some capacity, often unwittingly losing the 'fight' to an unnecessary adversary when life challenges us to one of its more formidable rounds.
What I noticed in my own practice during the odd roll or spar I gathered enough guts to partake in, was that the moments when things got genuinely physical were when the greatest challenge was not "defeating" my opponent, but making sure I didn’t get entangled in their mess.
Not being pulled into the hints of panic, unnecessary aggression, or chaos.
The moment I tried to match someone else's frenzy, I’d lost something more important than the round.
Myself.
"I am my own biggest enemy" was not a confession of weakness hidden in a profound quote, in my opinion, but a rather accurate technical observation about where the real work happens.
Maintaining rootedness, identity, and self while dealing with an onslaught that invites us, at every moment, to abandon them.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman, whose work on emotional intelligence has touched on precisely this kind of self-regulation under pressure, describes it as the ability to manage one's internal state independently of external provocation. The mat, though not as present in my life as I would have liked it to be (I always say, if I weren’t a musician, I’d be a martial artist), has also been one of the most honest laboratories for this that has existed in my life.
"In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity."— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The best martial artists are, at their core, peaceful people. Not passive, but peaceful.
There is a crucial difference. Passivity (and I have learnt this the very hard way, both on the mat and onstage) is the absence of engagement.
Peacefulness, on the other hand, the maintenance of a stable interior even when the exterior demands everything you have and more.
It is, again, a practice of capacity.
How much we can hold. The confusion, pressure, aggression, uncertainty…without losing the thread back to ourselves.
Why this matters
If this were only about music and martial arts, it would run the risk of sliding into an only partially interesting 'bro-hang'.
But I think the reason "holding space" is gathering importance in our culture the way it is is that we are beginning (albeit slowly, unevenly, and often reluctantly), to recognize how many of these principles apply everywhere.
Intimate relationships. Political discourse. The way we navigate a world that is simultaneously more connected and fractured than any previous generation has known.
The failures of our current zeitgeist in social media, politics, and public debate are almost perfectly described by the gap between the flashy soloist who cannot comp, and the T.L. who hid behind the piano comping all night long.
The 'fighter' who needs to display all the capability in the world while ignoring the need for their capacity to stay rooted and enrich the life of their opponent and the community.
We are drowning in output and starving for presence.
The rhetorical equivalent of the flashy performer is everywhere: loud, technically proficient, reluctant to observe, and absolutely certain that more volume from their side is the answer.
But nobody seems to be able to actually resolve conflict without learning to hold the multiple truths going around, many of which might feel ‘dissonant’ to those used to pitches they have come to categorize as an absolute truth in their worlds.
And without the willingness to let the complexity be complex for as long as it takes before reaching for the resolution when all the tension suddenly makes sense, the entire ensemble falls amidst frantic solos from everyone desperate to say their piece.
The playful spar at the dojo devolves into a brawl in a society losing coherence in its indignance to hear what the person from across the room is actually trying to say.
Meanwhile, we are all in the same room, fighting for the very space wellness junkies are so intent on selling us courses on to teach how to hold through glorified productivity systems and skill-building frameworks without the enlarged interior volume to hold it being addressed appropriately.
Capability might get us in the room.
But it's capacity that determines if we stay. And how we do so.
"Sometimes we just want to feel without trying to define or describe or deconstruct or dissect. It's incredibly powerful to be able to explain how you feel. Whether you want to exercise that skill or not." — Cameron Shayne
Cameron Shayne, whose Budokon movement-arts system weaves martial arts, yoga, and mindfulness into a single discipline, frames the whole endeavor not as ‘combat training’ but as the cultivation of presence under pressure.
That is the distinction that a lot of this article has been circling.
Capacity first, the willingness to simply feel, to hold the experience without rushing it into language or resolution. And then capability in its proper place, not as a substitute for presence, but as something that becomes available once it is established.
But it's my dear friend, Pakistani-American New York guitarist Rez Abbasi, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary jazz, who I keep returning to for one of the clearest bridges back to music and to what all of this is ultimately pointing at.
I try and surrender on all my records, or every time I play, (whatever surrender means to you). But if you hear it more on this record, then maybe it's a less kind of high-energy bashing record than some of the other ones. People have said, ‘’yeah..I like the mellowness’’. I don't know what the mellowness is. I don't hear mellowness. I mean, it's just because of this acoustic guitar versus, you know, electric and all that. But there are mellow moments for sure. But the surrender thing, yeah, I mean, basically the album is, you know, kind of dealing with loss and impermanence -Rez Abbasi
And to wrap up this essay, I’ll quote the G.O.A.T. himself, my teacher Kenny Werner. Pianist, composer, and author of Effortless Mastery. In my view and that of many others, one of the most important thinkers the arts has produced on what it actually means to get out of our own way.
"Music can shoot through the musician like lightning through the sky if that music is unobstructed by thoughts... If the musician is illuminated from within, he becomes a lamp that lights other lamps." — Kenny Werner, Effortless Mastery
That is the bigger picture. Being the light that can light others up.
What becomes possible when capacity and capability are finally in balance: when the former is so deeply embodied it no longer demands attention. And the interior space is large enough to receive when the latter wants to come through.
The ‘performer' stops performing and starts transmitting.
The ’speaker’ stops speaking and starts listening.
References
Primary Sources / Direct Quotes
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836–1886) — "Joto mot, toto poth." Oral teaching, widely documented in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, transcribed by Mahendranath Gupta, first published 1897.
Miles Davis — "It takes a long time to play like yourself" and "Don't play what's there; play what's not there." Both widely attributed; sourced and contextualised in Tingen, P. (2001). Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis. Billboard Books.
Thelonious Monk — "The piano ain't got no wrong notes." Widely attributed oral remark, documented in Kelley, R.D.G. (2009). Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. Free Press.
Miyamoto Musashi — "The ultimate aim of martial arts is not having to use them." From Musashi, M. (c.1645). The Book of Five Rings (Go Rin No Sho).
Sun Tzu — "In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity." From Sun Tzu (c.5th century BC). The Art of War.
Rez Abbasi — On 'surrender'. Tapasya Loading
Cameron Shayne — Quote on feeling vs. defining. Tapasya Loading.
Kenny Werner — "Music can shoot through the musician like lightning through the sky if that music is unobstructed by thoughts" and "If the musician is illuminated from within, he becomes a lamp that lights other lamps." From Werner, K. (1996). Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within. Jamey Aebersold Jazz Incorporated.
Secondary Sources / Academic References
Nichols, M.P. (1995). The Lost Art of Listening. Guilford Press. Referenced in relation to the neuroscience of receptive listening and the suppression of self-referential processing as a prerequisite for genuine presence.
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books. Referenced in relation to self-regulation under pressure — the ability to manage internal states independently of external provocation — as it applies to both martial arts practice and interpersonal conflict.
Rogers, C.R. (1980). A Way of Being. Houghton Mifflin. Rogers' concept of unconditional positive regard and therapeutic presence — the quality of being with another that is neither passive nor intrusive — informs the article's distinction between passive receptivity and active capacity.
Berliner, P.F. (1994). Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. University of Chicago Press. The definitive academic study of jazz cognition, ensemble listening, and the social pedagogy of improvisation. Contextualises the comping discussion and Miles Davis's philosophy of musical space.
Kano, J. (1986). Kodokan Judo. Kodansha International. Source for the philosophical grounding of Judo's principle of ju yoku go o seisu — softness controls hardness — as it relates to the martial arts discussion.
Aristotle — "The mark of an educated mind is the ability to hold a thought without accepting it." Widely attributed, though the precise phrasing does not appear in surviving texts; likely a paraphrase of passages in Nicomachean Ethics. Cited in the article with appropriate qualification.
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